South African rocker Johnny Clegg: a lifetime of bringing cultures together

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By Jay Miller

Jack-of-all trades Jay Miller writes about boxing, high school sports and music. A native of West Bridgewater, he was captain of his high school track team. He played football at Stonehill College. He also played guitar, bass, sax, bongos and drums.
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Jack-of-all trades Jay Miller writes about boxing, high school sports and music. A native of West Bridgewater, he was captain of his high school track team. He played football at Stonehill College. He also played guitar, bass, sax, bongos and drums. He and a friend had a duo, covering Dylan and Creedence. While in grad school at Boston University, he spent many free afternoons at Fenway Park. He covered Marvin Hagler from bouts at Brockton High to Las Vegas, has written for The Ring, Fight Fax and Boxing Illustrated. He began reviewing music for The Patriot Ledger in 1986, along with all kinds of sports. He's been on the PawSox beat since about 1998. He once met Bo Diddley at the old K-K-K-Katies in Kenmore Square, and still wonders whatever happened to The Ultimate Spinach.

After the death of Nelson Mandela last December, one of the most popular videos on social media was of South African rocker Johnny Clegg performing his song "Asimbonanga," written to salute Mandela before his 1990 release from prison. In those clips, from a 1999 concert, then President of South Africa Mandela walked out to join Clegg and even dance triumphantly as thousands cheered.

If you thought that moment was moving, wait until you hear Clegg, who performs Friday April 4 at the Somerville Theater, explain the song's title. Appleseed Recordings will release Clegg's newest album on April 29, and "Live & Unplugged at Baxter Theatre in Capetown" is a marvelous collection of 16 of Clegg's best songs, including "Asimbonanga."

"Our generation never saw Mandela--his image was banned," Clegg explained from a New Orleans tour stop. "That word, in Zulu, means 'we have never seen him,' and it was meant to allow us to have a very strong image. The song speaks of '22 kilometers of water that need to be crossed before we are one country,' because that's how far offshore the island prison was, where they had held him."

"The song "Asimbonanga" was banned by the government, but it became an underground hit in South Africa anyway," said Clegg. "When I wrote it, in 1986, I meant it to mean 'don't be depressed by the struggle.' The army had come into a township near where I lived and shot and killed a lot of the village guys, and we were hoping it wasn't the beginnings of a civil war.† I had stumbled around our rehearsal room that day, in a bad mood, and gradually that song came to me. I never would've known that 13 years later, while we're playing in Frankfurt, he would walk onstage like that. That particular moment was a pinnacle of my whole writing career."

Clegg, now 60, has had a remarkable career, selling over five millions albums worldwide, many of them in a succession of apartheid-defying bands that were multi-racial. Called 'The White Zulu,' Clegg is of British descent but was raised in South Africa. Fascinated at an early age by the cultures around him, he naturally gravitated to the study of anthropology at University of the Witwatersand in Johannesburg. But he was too restless for a purely academic life, and soon founded the band Juluka, with Zulu musician Sipho Mchunu in 1969.

"I was street-smart by the time I was fifteen," said Clegg. "I was arrested a few times, and managed to get out of a lot of trouble. Juluka, (which means 'sweat,')† was an attempt to break down cultural segregation, joining Western and Zulu music together. The Juluka days were a very difficult time for us, and we had to deal with all sorts of impediments. There were racial segregation laws in every area of organizational space in your life. Life is South Africa then was all defined by such laws. Whites were not allowed to go into black areas without permission, and you could actually be arrested."

"There were separate amenities acts," Clegg continued, "so that theaters, swimming pools, performing halls were all segregated. We're be playing in black community halls, and I'd say 20-30 percent of our shows were closed down. Of course we got no airplay. Each language had its own radio station. When we played very conservative areas, they were not at all happy with us--a multi-racial band--playing, and we found our truck tires spiked after several shows."

With all of those obstacles, Juluka still managed to produce two platinum and five gold albums, selling their music abroad and through underground means in South Africa. Their 1982 single "Scatterlings of Africa" was an international hit, and was later used in the soundtrack to the American movie 'Rain Man.' But by 1986, Mchunu decided to go back to his traditional life as a farmer, and Juluka faded away.

Clegg studied some more and became more overtly political. His next group, Savuka, meant 'we have awakened," and it was also a band more oriented to rock. It is said that the assassination of David Webster, a sociologist/anthropologist who'd been a mentor of sorts, inspired Clegg to write "One Man, One Vote," one of his most rousing topical songs of the time.

"Juluka was more about cultural resistance," Clegg noted, "while Savuka was far more direct and open about changing things. My studying anthropology was a natural extension of my interest in all cultures. I had actually been doing anthropology without knowing it, learning Zulu by the time I was 16, going to migrant labor hostels with the tribesmen, learning their dances and music, long before I ever got to university."

Ironically Clegg scored his biggest United States hit with one of his songs that has almost no political foundation, 1989's "Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World," which is an advisory of sorts to his toddler son, as well as a joyful anthem to living every moment. These days that son, Jesse Clegg, now 25, is opening the shows for dad and his sextet on this 40-date US tour.

"It does seem like a crazy thing to be singing that song while he's opening for me," Clegg laughed. "But it has evolved into a wonderful father-son thing for me. It was not easy for him to find his own voice and direction and he really struggled for awhile. Jesse is a an alternative rock artist, and a very good songwriter. I look at his song structures and I can see a lot of thought goes into it. My younger son, who's 19, is more into the audio-visual creative realm, and he'll be probably attending a West Coast (US) film school next year. We all discuss art, music, dance, politics, physics--it was always a house full of ideas bouncing around. But both dealt with having a well-known father in South Africa, and have done well to find their own spaces."

With Mandela gone now, South Africa is dealing with the nuts and bolts of democracy. The joy and idealism of the early days of equality have given way to the tedium of governing, and trying to keep the nation moving forward.

"We've gone through 20 years now, and had to deal with a lot of shortcomings," Clegg said. "People get the government they deserve. It is still a society of paradoxes and contradictions. You can't expect a country that has been a racist, totalitarian state for 48 years to be perfect at the democratic process in 20 years. There are strong tribal constituencies still, and a strong core of urban residents who favor more Western ideas about women. We are more or less making progress--we have more women in Parliament now, percentage-wise, than either the States or England for instance. There is a very strong push for gender equality."

"We've not done too bad as a free country," Clegg added. "But there are also lots of examples of corruption and other issues. It's difficult for a country to deal with a legacy of racism. We also have the conundrum of dealing with being a Third World country, and also a First World country in some respects--that's globalization for you. So we have all these multi-layered issues."

" And of course the younger generations--we call them 'the born-frees'--just don't know how good they have it," Clegg concluded with a rueful chuckle. "We stomp on them all the time when they complain; "go to your history books and learn about your country--you have no idea of the incredible social change we have just come through."

Incredible change Johnny Clegg can rightfully be proud of having played a part in.